The Geography Blog focusing on all things geography: human, physical, technical, space, news, and geopolitics. Also known as Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze!
Written by a former National Geographic employee who also proudly served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pages

Friday, January 19, 2007

Go East Young Man

National Geographic in the February 2007 issue has a map comparing concentrations of single men and single women. It appears many men have taken the advice of John Babson Lane Soule (or Horace Greeley depending who you believe) of "Go west, young man," and left the women in the east. Boston all the down to Washington D.C. is single woman central while it is raining men from Seattle to San Diego.

While I'd completely hate to be a man in a blue dot, I don't think men in the East have it quite as easy as this map implies.

The reason is that a significant proportion of America's "single women" are elderly widows, and I don't see that National Geographic filtered for an age range. Since the eastern states tend to have older populations, I would think that some of, for example, Pennsylvania's "orangeness" is due to nursing home patients rather than sweet, perky 24-year old dental hygienists.

From what I've heard, New York probably is really good for men (especially if you make over $200k on Wall Street), but I think a never-married 27-year-old male engineer in the big orange dot we call Indianapolis might find that his competition for 22-28 year old non-obese, never-married women with bachelor’s degrees is pretty tough.

Oh men on the East coast have it real easy. One guy actually complained to me that there were too many good looking women in new york city and it was tough to choose. I think the men who have a hard time in NYC are men who are exclusively looking for women who are out of their league or don't make an effort to approach women.